Human intelligence (HUMINT) is as old as humanity and to this day is one of, if not the best, methods for gathering information, due to the potential quantity and diversity of information that can be collected collected through this discipline. It is a method of gathering information through interpersonal relationships. In this assignment I will explain the difference between overt and clandestine HUMINT operations, introduce which members of the intelligence community use HUMINT, and describe their main methods. Finally, I will offer my opinion on whether I believe overt or clandestine HUMINT is more effective. The most important difference between overt and clandestine HUMINT operations is legality: most countries consider the collection of intelligence information by foreign agents to be a crime, so if an agent attempts clandestine collection or recruitment and is caught while attempting to gather information to which he or she is not entitled, deportation, incarceration, or worse could result. On the other hand, overt HUMINT collection is absolutely legal: this collection is mainly based on open source intelligence (OSINT) and can be described as the ability to collect, classify, process, categorize and make sense of huge amounts of data that is, theoretically, available to everyone. Two other important differences between overt and clandestine HUMINT collection operations are the official protocol and the nature of the information requested. Official protocol can dictate whether a collection operation is to be clandestine or not: for example, let's say that Italy, a country friendly to the United States, will hold talks with Libyan officials about a deal to sell military hardware to the latter: protocol official we can order our collectors to use only clandestine...... middle of paper...... linguistic and physical differences between our personnel and their sources (e.g. Iran, North Korea, China, etc. ). This is why I believe open HUMINT collection is where we should focus: the legality and relative ease of acquiring open source intelligence can provide us with a wide range of indicators that can be converted into comprehensive information with significant intelligence value. It is the result of an overt collection that constitutes the context that should lead to consideration of clandestine operations. One of the IC's biggest challenges is eliminating the Cold War mentality of our government: I fear that the United States still spends too much on ineffective clandestine programs when it would be better to invest those funds in more analysts and analytical tools to improve knowledge of vast information on the amounts obtainable through open collection.